1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to bases for display units.
2. Description of the Related Art
The invention was developed with particular attention to its possible use in conjunction with display units used to exhibit foodstuffs such as confectionery at points of sale.
A current practice entails the production of bases of this type in the form of products of the paper-transformation industry. Substantially speaking these are boxes of cardboard or similar material, generally having the shape of a parallelopiped, destined to stand on the ground and provided with an upper plane on which a display unit is placed (generally of the type with a number of shelves) on which the exhibited products are placed.
The purpose of the base is to maintain the display unit and the products that are on it in an easily visible and accessible position: it is considered undesirable for products to be located close to the floor, a position that also makes the operation of removing the products from the display unit inconvenient.
It is equally general practice to send the unit formed of the display unit (usually with the products already situated inside it) and the relative base to the places of exhibition and sale, as a unit already assembled and mounted. For this purpose, the display units mounted on their respective bases are loaded onto pallets so that they can easily be handled in groups of four or more units.
An intrinsic drawback connected with this solution lies in the fact that the base of the display unit is in the form of a body having rather considerable dimensions, but whose internal volume is completely unutilised. To use an expression widely used in the sector—this solution in practice translates into the operation of “transporting air”: a considerable part of the volume of the load of each pallet is occupied by cavities that are not utilised.
To avoid or at least to mitigate this drawback, a known and practised solution is to employ display units that can be taken apart, that are sent to the place of exhibition in a folded condition, after which they are mounted and receive the products in a subsequent loading operation of the mounted display unit.
Apart from all other considerations, this solution is not appreciated by those who must mount and load the display units at the place of exhibition. The operation of mounting the display unit may in some cases be fairly complicated for an operator who is not particularly expert. In any case, it is inevitable, as the final phase of setting up, that the products—which are transported to the place of exhibition separately, and thus inefficiently—must be loaded into the display unit.
When the display unit has completed its function, the problem arises of taking the display unit apart and disposing of it, including the base. This operation may be particularly hard above all if the display unit (and the base supporting it) are made of mixed materials, destined to follow different channels in the context of differentiated waste collection.